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MY HEART is torn: the Government is to abolish bedsits by 2013. Part of me says thank God. Another part says what business is it of the Government to choose how people live? Let the market decide. If you’re a certain age, namely, YOUNG, you probably don’t even know what a bedsit is. It is an entire flat, usually minus a bathroom, lavatory or fridge, distilled into a single small room. Everything that you notionally need is there, as it […]

THE clock clicks by. Irish democracy sleeps, the lullaby of Sinn Fein lies wooing it to a deadly slumber. Electors under 30 have little memory of the Troubles: those under 25, none. Mental partitionism, which became endemic in this Republic after about 1973, means that maybe half of those old enough to remember the Troubles do not actually do so: the memory receptors in their brains were instantly turned off by any mention of the North. And suddenly, we have […]

So the Fine Gael train seems to be hitting the buffers again. There’s one theory that all is going to plan; that the rival presidential candidates, having written off Gay Mitchell, will engage in mutual hari-kiri, leaving the Mitchell innards within. And then suddenly, bam, he’s back, scattering whatever entrails remain: next, he’s nodding presidentially as his metaphoric coach-and-four takes him to the old Vice-Regal Lodge. But even if Dublin votes for him in preference to some culchie, he’s unlikely […]

‘Migrants have been assaulted, urinated on and forced to leave their homes, a study on racism has found”: thus ran the opening line of a newspaper report on an ‘investigation’ by the Immigrant Council of Ireland. One would assume that the Immigrant Council’s allegations were based on a careful and extensive study of Irish society. Not true. The report was based on interviews with just 24 people, all of whom had presented themselves at the ICI Racist Incidents Support and […]

I had to get from near Dalkey to the M50 the other day. I might as well have been trying to get from Dover to London in late 1940. South Dublin County apparently prides itself on its absence of signposts; and its roundabouts are a multi-exited triumph of nameless bedlam. I remember writing about this, all of 20 years ago. Yet here we are, one entire Celtic Tiger later, with the beast having been conceived, gestated, reared, matured, murdered and […]

AT this point, I bid farewell to most of my female and American readers, as I turn to the subject of the Rugby World Cup. I’ll just give you all a moment to get your coats and go. Oh, and shut the door behind you, if you please. Thank you. Right. Do you know that one fifth of all players participating in the world cup are from the Pacific Islands of Tonga, Samoa and Fiji? Pacific Islanders, who are bigger, […]

A peaceful society only exists when we largely repress whatever emotions, desires, ambitions, likes and dislikes that would cause gratuitous offence or hurt or pain. Society requires the assertion of a common virtue as a primary adhesive, binding unfriends in an agreed commonwealth of bogus esteem. Therefore the head of state of any republic must at least SEEM to be the embodiment of that adhesive, and a lifelong public adherence to the Ten Commandments is a primary requirement for such […]

Last Saturday, just about the most brilliantly shocking supplement in the history of Irish journalism (give or take) appeared in this newspaper. It featured the monotone half-decade, 1950-54. Grey rosary processions of women in grey cardigans were blessed by grey bishops, while other grey bishops scattered grey droplets of holy water on grey soldiery in grey serge. Ireland was the colour of a granite jail cell, lit by the forlorn candle of guttering hope. Another supplement, for the late ’50s, […]

LISTEN to the Irish rugby players in New Zealand. They don’t speak any more of “lads” or “fellows” or “chaps”. Nowadays, to my mind tragically, they’ll only say “guys”. For Australians, the word “bloke” was once a defining term of their identity. Now it’s all “guys guys guys”. This week I got an email from the Broadcasting Authority on the subject of food advertising for children, asking all “stakeholders” to offer their opinions. And no, I have no idea what […]

ON Monday evening, the swallows gathered on the telephone wires. By Tuesday, they were gone, prompting some pretty age-old questions, such as: what will they do when underground optical-fibres and iPhones make telephone wires extinct? Will the swallows dig pits to squat subterraneanly on the fibres? Or will they cluster on children’s mobile phones, as the weighty little dears stand outside their schools, ponderously gorging upon a few thousand calories until their mothers drive them home, a massive mile away? […]